Abstract [en]

The existing network security infrastructure is not ready for future protocols such as Multipath TCP (MPTCP). The outcome is that middleboxes are configured to block such protocols. This paper studies the security risk that arises if future protocols are used over unaware infrastructures. In particular, the practicality and severity of cross-path fragmentation attacks utilizing MPTCP against the signature-matching capability of the Snort intrusion detection system (IDS) is investigated. Results reveal that the attack is realistic and opens the possibility to evade any signature-based IDS. To mitigate the attack, a solution is also proposed in the form of the MPTCP Linker tool. The work outlines the importance of MPTCP support in future network security middleboxes.

Afzal, Zeeshan

Abstract [en]

The evolution in networking coupled with an increasing demand to improve user experience has led to different proposals to extend the standard TCP. Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is one such extension that has the potential to overcome few inherent limitations in the standard TCP. While MPTCP's design and deployment progresses, most of the focus has been on its compatibility. The security aspect is confined to making sure that the MPTCP protocol itself offers the same security level as the standard TCP.

The topic of this thesis is to investigate the unexpected security implications raised by using MPTCP in the traditional networking environment. The Internet of today has security middle-boxes that perform traffic analysis to detect intrusions and attacks. Such middle-boxes make use of different assumptions about the traffic, e.g., traffic from a single connection always arrives along the same path. This along with many other assumptions may not be true anymore with the advent of MPTCP as traffic can be fragmented and sent over multiple paths simultaneously.

We investigate how practical it is to evade a security middle-box by fragmenting and sending traffic across multiple paths using MPTCP. Realistic attack traffic is used to evaluate such attacks against Snort IDS to show that these attacks are feasible. We then go on to propose possible solutions to detect such attacks and implement them in an MPTCP proxy. The proxy aims to extend the MPTCP performance advantages to servers that only support standard TCP, while ensuring that intrusions can be detected as before. Finally, we investigate the potential MPTCP scenario where security middle-boxes only have access to some of the traffic. We propose and implement an algorithm to perform intrusion detection in such situations and achieve a nearly 90% detection accuracy. Another contribution of this work is a tool, that converts IDS rules into equivalent attack traffic to automate the evaluation of a middle-box.

Abstract [en]

Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an extension to standard TCP that is close to being standardized. The design of the protocol is progressing, but most of the focus has so far been on its compatibility. The security aspect is confined to making sure that the MPTCP protocol itself offers the same security level as standard TCP. The topic of this thesis is to investigate the unexpected security implications raised by using MPTCP in a traditional networking environment. Today, the security middleboxes make use of different assumptions that may not be true anymore with the advent of MPTCP.We investigate how practical it is to evade a security middlebox by fragmenting and sending traffic across multiple paths using MPTCP. Realistic attack traffic generated from a tool that is also presented in this thesis is used to show that these attacks are feasible. We then go on to propose possible solutions to detect such attacks and implement them in an MPTCP proxy. The proxy aims to extend secure MPTCP performance advantages. We also investigate the MPTCP scenario where security middleboxes can only observe some of the traffic. We propose and implement an algorithm to perform intrusion detection in such situations and achieve a high detection accuracy.